On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 9:25 AM, Igor Stasenko <[email protected]> wrote:

> how different our systems would be, if guys who started it 20 years back
> would think a bit about future?
>

The guys who spend their time thinking about it lose, just as they always
do. Worse is better wins on the market. Brendan Eich was right to fear
something even worse than his rapidly hacked brainstorm child - i.e. if it
were not JavaScript/EcmaScript, we might be using proprietary VBScript from
Microsoft.

Do you remember those battles between behemoths trying to place proprietary
technologies in our browsers? I do. 'Embrace and extend' was a strategy
discussed and understood even in grade school. I'm a bit curious whether
Google will be facing an EOLAS patent suit for NaCl, or whether that
privilege will go to whomever uses NaCl and WebSockets to connect browsers
together.

It is interesting to see JS evolve in non-backwards-compatible ways to help
eliminate some of the poisons of its original design - eliminating the
global namespace, dropping callee/caller/arguments, development of a true
module system that prevents name shadowing and allows effective caching, and
so on. Mark Miller, who has performed significant work on object capability
security, has also started to shape JavaScript to make it into a moderately
sane programming language... something that could be used as a more
effective compilation target for other languages.
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